By Catherine Clabby
Twice in recent years, tough-to-extract, industrial chemicals have been detected in the Cape Fear River, a source of drinking water for millions of North Carolinians.
Both compounds pose health threats at certain concentrations but neither, as of yet, is regulated by federal water standards, which states help to enforce.
This month, the headline-grabbing culprit is GenX, a replacement chemical for a dangerous and persistent compound, perfluorooctanoic (PFOA). DuPont and other manufacturers have been sued for using PFOA for decades to make durable products such as Teflon and stain-resistant coating on carpeting.
A prior contaminant was 1,4 dioxane, a common manufacturing ingredient in plastics and other products that companies were releasing into municipal sewer lines in the upper reaches of the Cape Fear River without disclosure or measurement.
After both chemicals were disclosed, local and state government found themselves hustling to slow or stop the flow of substances not removed by equipment at most public drinking water plants.
And this cycle is very likely to occur again, said N.C. State University water quality scientist Detlef Knappe, whose laboratory was instrumental in uncovering the presence of both compounds. So it’s time to get more proactive about preventing unwelcome surprises, he has concluded.
“The chemicals are often protected as confidential business information,” Knappe said. “It’s much harder for scientists, regulators and drinking water providers to even know what’s in the water.”
Complex contaminants
GenX is an excellent example of a compound that few experts expected to find in public waterways until they did.
Manufacturers no longer use PFOA because it’s too dangerous; the compound persists indefinitely in the environment and accumulates in the human body. Epidemiologists have identified a probable link to PFOA exposures and high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension..
A DuPont spinoff company, Chemours, which operates a former DuPont plant in Fayetteville, replaced PFOA with GenX, a similar compound that was expected to degrade more easily than PFOA.
Companies such as Chemours have disclosed few specifics about the chemical structures and potential toxicities of PFOA replacements, making it difficult for anyone to assess if they too pose a threat, a team of EPA scientists reported in a 2015 paper.
In 2016, the scientific journal Environmental Science Technology Letters recognized the EPA team for its “stand out” study that described GenX and related compounds in the Cape Fear River. Some of the news was sobering: They found GenX and related compounds could not be removed by conventional or advanced drinking water treatment processes.
The fact that they don’t break down easily was concerning, Knappe said. “The thinking is the toxicity could be similar because structurally they are similar,” he said.
In December 2016, Knappe’s lab, working with the same EPA scientists, published a subsequent study. In that paper, the authors detailed how they detected the newer compounds at drinking water system intakes in Brunswick and Pender Counties and Wilmington.
The researcher notified water systems about the results. When word of that hit the pages of the Wilmington Star News newspaper this month, residents voiced anger, staged protests and demanded a cleanup.
Not the plan
Once, there was good reason to think this could not happen. When Chemours started producing GenX at its Fayetteville Works facility, about 100 miles upstream from Wilmington, it was required to prevent 99 percent of the compound from reaching surface waters.
It now appears that the GenX in the Cape Fear River, however, may be a byproduct of chemicals released at a vinyl ether processing facility at the Fayetteville Works site, said both Knappe and the office of U.S. Rep. David Rouzer, which is keeping his constituents apprised of GenX developments here.
Chemours has issued a statement saying that releases from its Fayetteville facility have not had an impact on the safety of the drinking water that comes from the Cape Fear River. But DEQ officials are investigating for themselves. They announced Monday that they will sample 13 locations in the Cape Fear over four weeks.
Chemours has agreed to pay for the sampling and testing.
While stressing they have no evidence that GenX contamination poses a health threat, Department of Health and Human Services officials have stressed they will keep lower Cape Fear region residents informed of whatever they find.
“We are working closely with DEQ to understand more about GenX and we will keep people informed as we get more information,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen said in a press statement.
A better way?
It’s reasonable to think that North Carolinians will be surprised again in the future about chemicals in public waters, said Susan White, executive director of the Water Resources Research Institute for the University of North Carolina system and North Carolina Sea Grant.
“EPA regulates only a portion of the chemicals we find in our waters,” White said. “That’s a challenge as our development of new chemicals increases so rapidly. We still aren’t always entirely sure of what is present.”
To prevent unpleasant surprises, companies that discharge chemicals into waterways should disclose more detail rather than shielding information for proprietary reasons, Knappe said. And regulators should be more cautious about allowing even small amounts to reach waterways.
“We’re seeing more and more chemicals that are almost impossible to remove from water. So, that makes it either extremely expensive or almost impossible for drinking water systems to remove all contaminants,” he said.
In North Carolina, funding for water quality protection has been cut in recent years, by 41 percent according to one informed estimate. But it should be expanded, Knappe said.
Executing widespread monitoring of river waters would help, White said. But she said it’s a complex and expensive job that requires frequent tests, statistically sound sample sizes and care not to let temperature or other conditions distort results.
“Monitoring is unsexy. No one wants to pay for it,” she said.
On top of that, questions will always persist about the best way to treat new contaminants once they are found.
“Is nanotechnology the best approach?” White asked. “If you answer yes, one of these days we’ll be trying to figure out what nanoparticles are doing in the water. It’s a trickle-down problem.”
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With consummate disdain and unalloyed ethical deficiency, DuPont and Chemours Management are trying to foist off their latest variation of the vile Teflon Toxin, C8, namely GenX, as safe to drink! But GenX is a look-alike, act-alike C8 manmade chemical which sticks to the ribs for God-only-how-long, and causes cancer even at the tiniest concentrations.
Whom do the fakers in Fortress Wilmington, Delaware think they are fooling?
Hopefully not the good citizens of North Carolina downstream from their water-poisoning plant upstream on the Fear River.
…funfun..